Subnational regimes vary significantly within
countries around the world. Even in well-established national
democracies “ like the USA in the 1950s or Argentina in the 1990s ”
local regimes are often far from democratic. In the last five
decades scholarship on political regimes has produced an impressive
body of research, but the focus has been mainly national. This
dissertation tackles what Robert Dahl called the “grave omission”
of subnational regimes by providing and justifying rigorous
descriptive and causal inferences for the 24 provinces of Argentina
between its re-democratization in 1983 and 2007. At the level of
description, I provide a detailed operationalization of the concept
of subnational democracy, including a “thick” conceptualization and
two alternative measurement strategies. The first (objective)
strategy resorts to electoral and institutional indicators to
create an index for all provinces and all gubernatorial terms since
1983. The second (subjective) strategy is based on the Survey of
Experts on Provincial Politics (SEPP), in which 155 experts in all
the provinces provided disaggregate information about their regimes
for the period 2003-2007. Seventeen indices of different aspects of
democracy were derived from this dataset. At the level of
explanation, I propose a rentier theory of subnational democracy,
which shifts the focus of the rentier-state literature up by
climbing Sartori’s ladder of abstraction from the concept of
resource rents to that of fiscal rents. Drawing on fiscal theories
of the state, I argue that inter-provincial regime differences are
to a large extent explained by a type of rentierism that is not
geographically determined by natural resources but politically
created by certain fiscal federalism arrangements. I posit that
less democratic regimes are more likely in rentier provinces “
those that receive disproportionately large central government
transfers and practically forgo local taxation. Intergovernmental
revenue-sharing rules that produce large vertical fiscal imbalances
and favor the economically smaller districts provide their
incumbents with generous fiscal federalism rents that allow them to
restrict democratic contestation and weaken checks and balances.
Statistical evidence from the Argentine provinces supports this
explanation, which overshadows its main alternative, modernization
theory. These findings are robust to alternative estimators and
measurement choices. Qualitative and quantitative evidence suggest
that the effects of heavy public spending and statism on the
economic autonomy of political actors are the main causal
mechanisms at work.
Advisors/Committee Members: Benjamin Radcliff, Committee Member, Scott Mainwaring, Committee Member, Frances Hagopian, Committee Member, Michael Coppedge, Committee Chair.